Will Obama's birth certificate silence conspiracy theorists?

Obama's birth certificate, on which it says he was born to Ann Dunham (pictured) in Hawaii, may not appease birthers who continue to question his eligibility for the presidency. Photograph: AP

That's a relief. The 44th president of the United States, commander-in-chief of the world's mightiest fighting force and leader of its sole superpower is a natural-born American and not an alien interloper.

A previously unseen birth certificate produced to scotch a chorus of doubters revealed that Barack Obama was indeed born in Hawaii, not in Kenya – the claim at the heart of many of the wild conspiracy theories that have dogged him.

On a day when he had other pressing matters to deal with – three military conflicts, massive national debt and rising oil prices to name a few – Obama appeared in front of television cameras to explain why he had decided to confront the "birthers" who have questioned his eligibility for the most powerful office on Earth.

"We do not have time for this kind of silliness," he said. "We're not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers."

He didn't name names, but there can be little debate about who he meant.

Step forward Donald Trump, reality TV judge, self-publicist supreme and carnival barker-in-chief who has made birther doubts a central plank of his highly theatrical flirtations with a presidential run.

Obama launched his counteroffensive on the day Trump was making his first visit to the electorally sensitive state of New Hampshire. That was a taste of the tactics that will become familiar as the presidential race gathers pace, though Trump pretended to be unfazed and even claimed credit for the release of the birth certificate. "I am very proud of myself. I have accomplished something nobody else has accomplished," he said.

The billion dollar question is this: by coming forward now with his detailed birth documentation, will Obama have contained the birther tide?

The idea that he was not born on US soil, and therefore does not have the right awarded to any American citizen to be voted into the White House, began to pick up momentum in 2007 when Obama's presidential ambitions became clear.

It has grown steadily ever since, with polls suggesting that one in four Americans harbour doubts about his birth, a proportion that rises to an astonishing four out of 10 Republican voters.

In 2008 Obama put out a shorter form of his birth certificate that acts as the legal proof of his Hawaiian birth, but birthers simply demanded to see the longer archived paperwork.

Obama also pointed to a birth notice in the local Honolulu Star Bulletin newspaper from 1961 that said "Mr and Mrs Barack H Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Highway, son, Aug 4." But that, the detractors said, could have been planted. Senior Hawaiian officials who said they had met Obama as a newborn baby and had seen with their own eyes the long-form birth certificate also failed to have any impact.

"I have watched with bemusement, I've been puzzled at the degree at which this thing just kept on going," Obama said.

The problem is, even this dramatic riposte by the president is unlikely to silence the nay-sayers. Prominent birthers contacted by the Guardian insisted this was not so much a battle lost as the start of a new engagement.

Orly Taitz (place of birth: Moldavia) welcomed the release of the birth certificate but added: "Now we need a federal inquiry into Obama's social security fraud."

Taitz said her fellow birther Neil Sankey (place of birth: UK) had discovered Obama had used multiple social security numbers suggesting he was covering up his ineligibility for the highest office. "We will continue our work," Taitz said ominously.

One of the earliest campaigners, Philip Berg, said he too had no intention of hanging up his birther boots. "The issue isn't Obama's birth in Hawaii. It's whether he was adopted in Indonesia which would have removed his status as a natural born American," he said.

Berg, a former senior prosecutor in Pennsylvania, has lodged three lawsuits and four supreme court pleadings relating to Obama's nationality. All were rejected by judges, but he said that he "absolutely" planned to continue the legal struggle.

For John Avlon, Daily Beast columnist and author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America, this is yet more evidence of the paranoid style of politics that he believes is strangling debate in America. Birther conspiracies have brought the base of the Republican party and the extreme fringe together.

"It has become a cycle of incitement," Avlon said. "As Jonathan Swift once said, you can't reason somebody out of something they were never reasoned into."

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